Share

The Yalta Conference ends, the first Gold Record is earned by Glenn Miller, Dick Cheney accidentally shoots his friend, and Nelson Mandela is released from prison for anti-apartheid activities in This Day in History video. The date is February 11th. Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years and went on to become the President of South Africa.

Nelson Mandela released from prison

Author

Website Name

Year Published

Title

URL

Access Date

March 19, 2018

Publisher

A+E Networks

Nelson Mandela, leader of the movement to end South African apartheid, is released from prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990.

In 1944, Mandela, a lawyer, joined the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest black political organization in South Africa, where he became a leader of Johannesburg’s youth wing of the ANC. In 1952, he became deputy national president of the ANC, advocating nonviolent resistance to apartheid–South Africa’s institutionalized system of white supremacy and racial segregation. However, after the massacre of peaceful black demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960, Nelson helped organize a paramilitary branch of the ANC to engage in guerrilla warfare against the white minority government.

In 1961, he was arrested for treason, and although acquitted he was arrested again in 1962 for illegally leaving the country. Convicted and sentenced to five years at Robben Island Prison, he was put on trial again in 1964 on charges of sabotage. In June 1964, he was convicted along with several other ANC leaders and sentenced to life in prison.

Mandela spent the first 18 of his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison. Confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing, he was forced to do hard labor in a quarry. He could write and receive a letter once every six months, and once a year he was allowed to meet with a visitor for 30 minutes. However, Mandela’s resolve remained unbroken, and while remaining the symbolic leader of the anti-apartheid movement, he led a movement of civil disobedience at the prison that coerced South African officials into drastically improving conditions on Robben Island. He was later moved to another location, where he lived under house arrest.

In 1989, F.W. de Klerk became South African president and set about dismantling apartheid. De Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC, suspended executions, and in February 1990 ordered the release of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela subsequently led the ANC in its negotiations with the minority government for an end to apartheid and the establishment of a multiracial government. In 1993, Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One year later, the ANC won an electoral majority in the country’s first free elections, and Mandela was elected South Africa’s president.

Mandela retired from politics in 1999, but remained a global advocate for peace and social justice until his death in December 2013.

Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

Also on this day

On this day in 1776, Georgia’s royal governor, Sir James Wright, escapes from his residence in Savannah to the safety of a waiting British warship, the HMS Scarborough, anchored at the mouth of the Savannah River, and returns to London. Governor Wright had been taken into custody and placed...

After a six-week sit-down strike by General Motors (GM) autoworkers at the Fisher Body Plant No. 2 in Flint, Michigan, GM president Alfred P. Sloan signs the first union contract in the history of the American auto industry. The strike was organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW), which wanted...

On this day in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln leaves home in Springfield, Illinois, and embarks on his journey to Washington, D.C.
On a cold, rainy morning, Lincoln boarded a two-car private train loaded with his family’s belongings, which he himself had packed and bound. Hiw wife, Mary Lincoln, was in St....

Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, former members of the British Foreign Office who had disappeared from England in 1951, resurface in Moscow. Their surprise appearance and formal statement to the press put an end to one of the most intriguing mysteries of the early Cold War.Maclean and Burgess had...

Emma Goldman, a crusader for women’s rights and social justice, is arrested in New York City for lecturing and distributing materials about birth control. She was accused of violating the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal offense to disseminate contraceptive devices and information through the mail or...

On this day in 1952, a series of deadly avalanches begins across central Europe.
A storm stalled over the middle of Europe the first week of February 1952, dumping a couple of feet of snow in parts of France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. In many places, activity came to a standstill....

In southern France, Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, a 14-year-old French peasant girl, first claims to have seen the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ and a central figure in the Roman Catholic religion. The apparitions, which totaled 18 before the end of the year, occurred in a grotto of a rock...

On February 11, 1945, a week of intensive bargaining by the leaders of the three major Allied powers ends in Yalta, a Soviet resort town on the Black Sea. It was the second conference of the “Big Three” Allied leaders–U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and...

From the Kagoshima Space Center on the east coast of Japan’s Ohsumi Peninsula, Ohsumi, Japan’s first satellite, is successfully launched into an orbit around Earth. The achievement made Japan the world’s fourth space power, after the Soviet Union in 1957, the United States in 1958, and France in 1965.
Two months...

In the latest of a series of legal battles involving J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved trilogy The Lord of the Rings and film adaptations made of the books, several of Tolkien’s heirs join a group of publishers in filing a $150 million lawsuit against New Line Cinema on February 11, 2008, in...

On this day in 1778, some 300 people visit Voltaire following his return to Paris. Voltaire had been in exile for 28 years.
Born Francois-Marie Arouet to middle-class parents in Paris in 1694, Voltaire began to study law as a young man but quit to become a playwright. He made a...

The Payola scandal reaches a new level of public prominence and legal gravity on this day in 1960, when President Eisenhower called it an issue of public morality and the FCC proposed a new law making involvement in Payola a criminal act.
What exactly was Payola? During the hearings conducted by...

On this day in 2012, Whitney Houston, one of the world’s top-selling singers from the mid-1980s to late 1990s, is found dead in the bathtub of her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Houston’s death was the result of accidental drowning; heart disease and cocaine, which...

Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian interpreter and guide to the Lewis and Clark expedition, gives birth to her first child, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first met the young Sacagawea while spending the winter among the Mandan Indians along the Upper Missouri River, not far from present-day Bismarck, North...

A week of secret meetings between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the Black Sea port of Yalta ends on this day in 1945, and Roosevelt and his daughter, Anna, begin their journey home. The meeting is Roosevelt’s last appearance at an international conference.
As an Allied...

In a major upset, Buster Douglas defeats Mike Tyson, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, in 10 rounds at a boxing match in Tokyo, Japan.
James “Buster” Douglas began boxing professionally in the 1980s and was considered a talented fighter, but it was believed he lacked the motivation to become...

Nine U.S. and South Vietnamese crewmen are killed in a SC-47 crash about 70 miles north of Saigon.
The aircraft was part of Operation Farm Gate, a mission that had initially been designed to provide advisory support in assisting the South Vietnamese Air Force to increase its capability. In December, President...

Russian General Alexei Maximovitch Kaledin, a commander of Russian forces during World War I and a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks, commits suicide on this day in 1918. Kaledin, born in 1861, was the son of a Don Cossack officer who early on began a military career of his own....

On this day, the German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escape from the French port of Brest and make a mad dash up the English Channel to safety in German waters.
The Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had been anchored at Brest since March 1941. The...